Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1832 - 3.20 Areas for Future Enhancement

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### 3.20 Areas for Future Enhancement

The XDR standard lacks representations for bit fields and bitmaps, since the standard is based on bytes. Also missing are packed (or binary-coded) decimals.

The intent of the XDR standard was not to describe every kind of data that people have ever sent or will ever want to send from machine to machine. Rather, it only describes the most commonly used data-types of high-level languages such as Pascal or C so that applications written in these languages will be able to communicate easily over some medium.

One could imagine extensions to XDR that would let it describe almost any existing protocol, such as TCP. The minimum necessary for this are support for different block sizes and byte-orders. The XDR discussed here could then be considered the 4-byte big-endian member of a larger XDR family.

Next: 4. DISCUSSION

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1832 - 3.20 Areas for Future Enhancement